We’re glad to see some bipartisan sanity injected into the budget process through a move that should start saving the state millions of taxpayer dollars beginning in July.

Democrats joined Republicans to rescue legislation that reforms a badly exploited loophole in the state’s Old Age Pension Fund.

Speeding through the General Assembly is a resurrected bill that could save cash-strapped state coffers $14 million or more annually by requiring legal immigrants in Colorado to follow federal rules regarding public assistance.

The legislation should stop the abuse of sponsored legal immigrants from drawing as much as $700 a month from the pension fund. The loophole had allowed the legal immigrants to become the dominant users of the fund, drawing $53 million in benefits from the $80 million program, even though their citizen-sponsors agreed to support them.

The bill seeks to stop that abuse while still protecting refugees and legal immigrants whose sponsors abuse or abandon them.

The state legislature is well past finding any easy answers to the state budget shortfall, so most cuts will hurt, but we saw this as an obvious one.

Earlier, we had decried the lack of backbone on the part of Democrats to see it through. We’re now pleased to see their support for this well-reasoned bill.